


Belonging

by brook456



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Stanuary, starring my aggressive misuse of emdashes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 09:26:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9228734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brook456/pseuds/brook456
Summary: Stan searches for his home.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is for week one of Stanuary, with the prompt "Home." I did it rather quickly but I hope you enjoy.

Perhaps he was wrong to chase something he had might have never had. To look back at the past with rose-tinted glasses and hope that he could regain something more than a shadow of something that perhaps wasn’t even real. After all, much of his happiness had been the naivety of a child, nothing more than another one of his lies, his tricks, his facades. To pretend he did not notice the the disappointment—no, contempt—creeping behind his father’s glasses, to pretend that he had been surprised on that terrible night—how, how could the inevitable have happened?—when even _he_ , he who had promised, he who had been there by his side, he who had loved him, turned away. Pretend it had been betrayal, sudden, unforeseen. That his hurt when he was cast out on the street had been shock, not the realization that this had been long in coming, that he had never truly belonged. That when he hit the ground with his things lobbed at his head he had realized he had lost a home, not realized that he had never had one.

And he certainly didn’t after the fact, didn’t for a long time, didn’t even have a name. Homeless—more apt a description than one would know, with no roof over his head, yes, but neither with a foundation to his soul. He had no attachments, nothing to make him feel safe, to feel loved, and the few times he worked up the courage to try to return, even just to catch a glimpse of his brother walking around his campus, books piled high—there was this terrible feeling of not belonging, of being out of place, of knowing that his presence there was an affront, an abomination. Even when, after all those long years, he was explicitly _invited_ to see him, he could not shake the wrongness of himself, there. He believed, almost, that when he crossed the threshold of that cabin, he, or perhaps the house, ominous, terrible, _other_ —would burst into flame. As it turned out, such thoughts were not so unfounded.

But he stayed, despite everything, desperate, clinging to that vision of the past that seemed each day to be more and more of a dream. The place was never really his, never seemed to go from house to home—no matter what he did, what he tried. Not that, at first, he even touched that shack—it was only a desperate need for food that gave him the courage to change it, and even just moving what was there, or adding something here…it felt wrong, like the desecration of a tomb. He did not belong.

Still, necessity and routine are friends of the fearful—it became easier and easier to walk those halls, to leave his own little marks. Let him seem a part of a scenery—no one would guess that he was not, padding around there with his things hidden in every nook and cranny, a man and his house. But what they did not know is that he had thrown away nothing. That the carpets and furnishings he left mostly in their place, that there were rooms where he rather not tread, which he had sealed off with wallpaper and tried to forget. That in the moments he let himself get too comfortable he would suddenly feel the hairs on the back of his neck prickling and rememberer what lay _below._ Remember whose feet were supposed to tread here instead of his. Remember he had no home.

And then things began to change.

He didn’t realize it, not at first—he had long forgotten what it meant to belong, stopped really believing he ever had. The house still wasn’t his, though he had tried everything—renamed it, hidden away any memory of its owner, placed his own things in the foreground. Rather, when he thought back on it, it was bringing in people, bringing in help, that changed everything. Turning a corner and seeing that boy toddling around and trying his best to fix whatever thing had gone awry, seeing him grow. Getting ready to grumble at the girl for slacking off, spotting her on the roof rather than at the desk. People, his people, here. And then the twins—they did more than anything really, gave him another purpose to pursue. They saw him as owner of this sprawling place, a man in his castle. And were they wrong? He used its roof to cover them, its beds to keep them warm. He used its wares to provide for them, he defended it against threat again and again. No, it never stopped being his brother’s, but perhaps it could be shared. And even those dark spaces, well…he brought the image of the children down into that basement, a torch that cast a sense of belonging into that strange and forbidding place. And when he sat there, in the long hours of the night, even with the maw of that terrible machine there before him, he was not afraid. Why? Because with that picture there, on the desk, the crooked grins and smiling eyes—he was home.


End file.
